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I never cease to be amazed by the heights of concise arguments here...

5 hours ago, metcalph said:

There are better things to do then to make appeals to authority based on the use of a particular name in some hoary text that neither Greg nor Chaosium bothered to release publicly.

Feel free to ignore me. The Guide gives us a Silmarillion level collection of the old story data. I would be happier with a Book of Lost Tales level of access to these stories, though I am happy to ignore the later rehashes of the Tolkien estate, and wouldn't go as far with hoary Glorantha documents, either.

5 hours ago, metcalph said:

Except that Naveria is not a goddess whose name is obscured in the myth whereas Brightface is.

The name "Naveria" is a title, with the component "eria" clearly meaning "woman". The meaning of "Nav" is obscure.

5 hours ago, metcalph said:

Yelm is not parallel to Brightface etc because Yelm may not have existed in the Golden Age.

I still think that the concept of the static emperor is Brightface. Whether his myth is limited to Naveria or whether it is paralleled elsewhere (e.g. in the bit about confronting Basko, Molandro and Jokbazi on his ascent in the as hoary Jonstown Compendium tidbit).

IMO Brightface is a Change of Cycle myth, not Golden Age, or at least not the one that the God Learner monomyth would recognize.

One problem I have with the Monomyth is that it suppresses all earlier cycles of rise and decline. These may be even less solidly remembered than the pre-Gods War fragments.

All of Glorantha is a collage or mosaic of mythic fragments, the Hero Planes as much as the mundane world, where the Gods War has destroyed much earlier detail and richness. The spider silk reconstruction is what we have to work with, but it is just what could be salvaged, far from what went on.

Entekosiad is the one Stafford Library document which gives hints at some of these earlier cycles, which makes it the richest and at the same time the hardest to parse of the library pieces.

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I'm not sure if I can see Vezkarvez or Ezelveztay as incarnations of the Fire Rune itself - imho, they supersede (and precede) those concepts and strike me as more in line with Glorantha (the goddess), the Invisible God (in the sense of being a world-maker who stands above the separation of runes as separate, definite entities), the Draconic/Vithelan Ouroboros/the Cosmic Dragon, etc. etc. In short, they appear to be another entry into Greg's tendency to give his polytheistic mythologies a monistic anchor-point. It's a motif that repeats itself a lot, though not everywhere, in Glorantha.

As for the rest - again, it's certainly possible, and I do love a good mythic conspiracy. However, I think this latest "summary", while very clean and straightforward, mimicks the "orthodox" Dara Happan propaganda (ie. the Reascent) a bit too much without taking into account the differing perspectives we have. In other words, it appears to me to be essentially a re-jiggering of some names and titles, but essentially the same narrative. I personally strongly doubt larger section of that narrative, partially due to not knowing how tampered with it was during the First Age Dara Happan reconstruction, but also due to the almost mind-boggingly complex and contradictive partial narratives we have from around the Pelorian basin that just doesn't fit into it, and which appear to be older than it.

For example - both the Monomyth (or some Heortling myths, iirc) and Dara Happan myths seem to argue that the Emperor was a being who was "chosen/elected" or what have you, to lead and rule (and was apparently specifically made for this purpose). I'm skeptical of that, or rather, I'm skeptical that the apparent turn to centralized, patriarchal power was entirely legitimate. Something fishy went on there, as per the Entekosiad (or even the Vithelan myths, which depict Vith and his successors as less solar-centric, if indeed they even are solar entities).

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Six Ages also "reveals" that Elmal is not a native Orlanthi deity, but rather the "exiled" sun god of Verapur, the southern city of the Decapolis. As the Verapurans (the Hyalorings and Samnali) chose to ride out rather than join the other Dara Happans in the ice dome …

While I’m happy to see the myths subject to multiple interpretation, 1. The Riders are from Nivorah (GRoY.30); 2. Verapur is a northern city.

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Verapur was the main city-state of Rinliddi in the Golden and Storm Ages, and associated with the bird-deities like Avarnia , Vrimak (possibly) and Tholm, and may possibly have been the capital of the independent Ratite/Riskesting Empires or Rinliddi Dynasties of Peloria (it's a bit hard to say exactly what the political situation was). It was also the northernmost of the remaining Dara Happan cities immediately prior to the Glacial period, and it was the first one that got squashed. Acording to the Reascent, the Dara Happans said they had to evacuate/join the other city states in building the Roof to protect them from the glacier - but the Verapurans believed that they would be able to melt the glacier away as it neared in. They were wrong.

That's probably why I mixed it with Nivorah - both got taken by the glacier - but Verapur was the first, and Nivorah was the last. Both rejected Imperial commandments as well. One is the city of birds, the other evidently a city of horses.

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"Umath" is another child of the sun from a different mother. Call him a "little sun" too or call him a storm. He aims high and is brought low. One of the "little sun" peoples develops a little differently in his memory shadow. Maybe they were raised in isolation, unconnected with their cousins until later.

Good thought, and too obvious for us all to see.

Edited February 10 by Ian Cooper

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I personally strongly doubt larger section of that narrative, partially due to not knowing how tampered with it was during the First Age Dara Happan reconstruction, but also due to the almost mind-boggingly complex and contradictive partial narratives we have from around the Pelorian basin that just doesn't fit into it, and which appear to be older than it.

I agree. All reconstruction is difficult, because we are looking at fragments that 'leak' the older concepts. And I have not really sought to try and tackle Entekosiad - although I believe that there is probably a whole that we can pull from including that, I have just not really tried to include that yet. I was more interested in this question of the Many Suns and who is Yelm in this thread.

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Entekosiad is pretty much about the struggle of archaic Earth matriarchy and communities versus Solar patriarchy and violence. But the sense one gets from it is that there were suns and moons and night and day before the advent of Brightface the Emperor - as Joerg says.

Not every little sun is the child of Yelm or Aether, and there has always been a Sun Daughter, who may have once been the Moon-White Sun, and the death and regeneration of the Sun is a process of ritual sacrifice and death and birth. Every day the sun dies in the embrace of the West and is birthed in the East. It is hubris (or a lie) for the Sun to shirk death, and hubris to claim he (or she) has no mother.

The Yelm which does not move cannot lovingly die in the ritual bath of the Western Ocean, and cannot be born. The trouble with Gbaji is that obscures such things. This is despite the fact that Rashoran[a] is also an aspect of the cyclical White Moon-Sun, the god/dess of being Yes and No.

Illusion is more truthful than Law, and here Antirius' justice, of having 'codes' and 'laws' breaks down. The Entekosiad makes clear that decisions were temporary, judgments are contextual, and everyone gets a say in the wide circle. Yet Antirius is born out of the weaving woman, or out of the part of the ancient goddess that is Dendara, or Entekos, the Mother of Moons. There is a constant return: the boy is given authority to fight and aid the women, but he refuses to relinquish it. He fights his brothers for it, claims he was king all along. The crown of the Red City, of the incestuous tyrant, is part of the panoply of the Emperor. He rises up and seizes his mother and his sister, and calls them wives.

Every night the moon rose and refuted the Sun. She is older and eclipses Him. So she was torn apart. Here she is again. One of her suns, Sons, Antirius, is bound in the Emperor; another Kargzant, is the Sun of the Morning. Yelm pretends she is not there. Of course it is he who is not there. Being Rashorana, she can see through him, there is no dazzling the Mother/Sister.

With the Compromise, of course, the Cycle seems abeyant. But this is temporary. There are always new Gods, who step into the names and stories and shadows of older ones. The warrior beats his mother. Death comes for the Emperor. We may not be able to be spirits again for good, but we can be for a little while. The thing about spirits, and sons, and mothers, is that there are always many of them, and there being only one of anything is pretty silly and unsustainable. The Red King has a substantial human component, as do the ordinary women who are what they later called Gods. The word god doesn't come up in the Entekosiad. There are other, more specific, and more general terms.

There has long been a loophole in the Compromise that made ancestors Gods. The divine lords of Dara Happa are earthly because their souls are made of people. 'Now he is with the Sun' is close to 'Now he is the Sun'. One of the secrets of Orlanth is that he is in every breath. One of the secrets of Yelm is that he is light. They used to be Breath and Light and that was sufficient. Glorantha is a world where myths are real. But it is also a world where they are simply stories.

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Beren and Redalda are mortals. Their story becomes stories about the gods, that is Elmal and Reydalda. The mortal world casts a shadow on the divine. Hence the Emperors and kings of Dara Happan cities and states and the Rider and Wheel chieftains are not merely representing their god (whichever Sun it is) but actively altering and influencing the god in whose name they rule... Every city and every culture has its own Sun, which is in part a representation of what they think is an ideal ruler or Earth-consort. Making 'Yelm' in the First Age in a sense created the synthetic history of pre-Dawn Dara Happa. But these emperors and hence the Suns they were were not really ruling a unified realm. It only appears that way because of the triumph of Raibanth and the rewriting of myth.